Today's theater management systems are structured for film projection. Key elements of the systems include a ticketing system, a film projector, a slide projector, a sound system and a theater automation system for semi-automatically controlling basic theater functions such as lighting and audio.
A typical show is divided into two major time segments, pre-show slides used for advertisements, trivia, and facility announcements, and the actual show time composed of show trailers and the feature film.
The exhibitor sells pre-show time to screen advertisers. The screen advertiser then forms advertising contracts with its clients. Contractual conditions include the number of times an advertisement must play, what kind of feature film the advertisement will play with, how long the advertisement will be, and what the start and end engagement dates will be.
With today's slide projector advertising systems these conditions are laborious to fulfill, and are at best based on trust relationships that cannot be easily verified or repudiated by the advertiser. These systems therefore do not leave the advertiser much room for process, product, or profit improvement. What advertisers require are flexible systems that give them control of pre-show advertising content creation, distribution and projection. What exhibitors require are systems that minimize their need to support the advertising portion of the show and do not negatively impact their current feature film workflow and practices.
The show time is used to present trailers and feature films. The theater owner rents films from the originating studios under a set of terms and conditions. These terms include the financial arrangements between the two parties, and the start and end engagement dates. The theater owner does exercise some freedom in terms of executing the schedule on a day-to-day basis during this time. The scheduling is completed weekly, but in some cases the schedule is updated on short notice to accommodate customer response.
The schedule is entered into a point of sale ticketing system that drives a display of the schedule, manages ticket sales and printing, and reports financials associated with the sales. Playback execution of this schedule is effectively independent of that data entry. It is rather a projectionist's interpretation of the schedule and subsequent physical setup of advertising slides on slide projectors, and splicing of advertisement, trailer and feature film content reels on specific instances of projection equipment that are the manifestation of the schedule. Again, a laborious process that can benefit significantly from digital management systems.
Such systems and methods for presentation of digitized content in a cinema environment have been disclosed. U.S. Patent Application No. 2003/0048418 entitled “Presentation Scheduling in Digital Cinema System” presents a system that supports scheduling of digitized content in a purely digital cinema system. It recognizes the need for interfacing with existing theater automation subsystems for environment control but does not adequately address issues with “transitional” digital cinema; “transitional” meaning a system that is comprised of both film projection and digital projection subsystems and incorporates methods and mechanisms that permit cooperation of the two. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,700,640 B2, entitled “Apparatus and Method For Cueing a Theater Automation System”, describes a solution for building digital “platters” comprised of trailers and feature film content with sensitivity to attributes such as display aspect ratio, sound track format, and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings. Again, this is discussed in the context of pure digital cinema where presenting alerts to a user at schedule creation time enforces the compatibility of content. This contrasts the algorithm-driven schedule assessment to be described here, which encompasses both hybrid systems utilizing a combination of film projection and digital projection systems and/or combination systems meeting the unique needs of pre-show in combination with show time. Lastly, WO 01/13301entitled “System and Method For Digitally Providing and Displaying Advertisement Information To Cinemas and Theaters” discusses a just-in-time advertising model. In this invention, content providers submit new content data instances to an algorithmic “carousel” which may not guarantee playback. While this may suit some advertising situations it is not a widespread practice and still requires operator support at the exhibition facility. What is required by advertisers and exhibitors are systems that at a minimum give them the control to manage their respective portions of the show time with no additional workflow and more ideally add new efficiencies to their existing workflow. A void therefore remains in the prior art.